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Micro-expressions are facial expressions that have a short duration (generally less than 0.5 s), involuntary appearance and low intensity of movement. They are regarded as unique cues revealing the hidden emotions of an individual. Although methods for the spotting and recognition of general facial expressions have been investigated, little progress has been made in the automatic spotting and recognition of micro-expressions. In this paper, we proposed the Main Directional Maximal Difference (MDMD) analysis for micro-expression spotting. MDMD uses the magnitude of maximal difference in the main direction of optical flow as a feature to spot facial movements, including micro-expressions. Based on block-structured facial regions, MDMD obtains more accurate features of the movement of expressions for automatically spotting micro-expressions and macro-expressions from videos. This method obtains both the temporal and spatial locations of facial movements. The evaluation was performed on two spontaneous databases (CAS(ME)\(^{2}\) and CASME) containing micro-expressions and macro-expressions.

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) are believed to contribute towards economic development of host countries through foreign direct investment (FDI), which results in poverty alleviation and human empowerment through linkages and spillovers with local stakeholders. However, earlier research demonstrates that the positive impact of FDI is often inconclusive. There is thus a gap in understanding the link between the activities of MNEs in developing countries and their impact on socio-economic development. This volume reports the results of a large international ‘MNEmerge’ research project, financed by the European Commission, and provides an understanding of the impact of MNEs on United Nations Millennium Development Goals and successive Sustainable Development Goals in developing countries.

Behavioral evidence shows that the recognition of micro-expression is impaired by emotional context, especially negative context. However, the neural oscillatory features of such emotional context effect on recognition of micro-expression remain unclear. The present study used time-frequency analysis to explore the event-related spectral perturbation (ERSP) characteristics reflected in the processing of micro-expression followed emotional contexts. In the occipital-central region, we found that emotional context modulated micro-expression spectral power in alpha band and a strong suppression of alpha oscillation was observed in negative context. This study provided spectral dynamic evidence in support of the effect of emotional context during micro-expression recognition.

The relationship between multinational enterprises (MNEs) and host governments has seen different waves of trust and mistrust. Over the years, it has changed from a period of conflict after World War II, where MNEs were investing for purposes felt to be contradictory to government policies, to a more cooperative one, where countries are providing incentives and competing with each other to attract foreign direct investment (FDI). The 1990s saw the cooperative relationship leading to the danger of race to the bottom through excessive locational competition. In this chapter, we look at the past, present, and future state of this relationship as reported by different scholars from these periods. We look at the most influential literature from the 1970s onward and the current state of this relationship. Our analysis reveals that the increased tensions are caused by anxiety owing to unanticipated developments in the political economy, company strategies, and government policies. Thanks to globalization MNEs are increasingly becoming more powerful and often this process is accelerated owing to lack of any collaboration between MNEs and the governments. Thus, governments, particularly in emerging markets, are becoming more and more frustrated by the fact that on the one hand they want the MNEs to come and invest in their countries and, on the other hand, they feel that they cannot direct these MNEs to contribute toward economic development and poverty alleviation in their countries. In this chapter, we intend to evaluate the past and the present literature and look ahead to the future. Finally, on the basis of our own studies performed in this project and reported in different chapters of this book, we provide some policy guidelines for host country governments as to how they can encourage MNEs to contribute toward sustainable development and poverty reduction.

The present study used a single-task paradigm in which participants received guidance to focus more attention (waiting for someone) on the temporal intervals in the "waiting" condition and to stay relaxed in the control condition. The reported time was longer in the waiting condition than in the control condition. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy was used to measure simultaneously the activation levels of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) for each condition. Greater oxyhemoglobin (oxy-Hb) activation in the waiting condition was observed compared with the control condition, whilst deoxyhemoglobin data showed no difference between the two conditions. The gradual changes in oxy-Hb in the DLPFC in increments of 100 ms yielded further insights into the role of this region in the "watched pot never boils" phenomenon.

The 2.1D sketch is a layered image representation, which assigns a partial depth ordering of over-segmented regions in a monocular image. This paper presents a global optimization framework for inferring the 2.1D sketch from a monocular image. Our method only uses over-segmented image regions (i.e., superpixels) as input, without any information of objects in the image, since (1) segmenting objects in images is a difficult problem on its own and (2) the objective of our proposed method is to be generic as an initial module useful for downstream high-level vision tasks. This paper formulates the inference of the 2.1D sketch using a global energy optimization framework. The proposed energy function consists of two components: (1) one is defined based on the local partial ordering relations (i.e., figure-ground) between two adjacent over-segmented regions, which captures the marginal information of the global partial depth ordering and (2) the other is defined based on the same depth layer relations among all the over-segmented regions, which groups regions of the same object to account for the over-segmentation issues. A hybrid evolution algorithm is utilized to minimize the global energy function efficiently. In experiments, we evaluated our method on a test data set containing 100 diverse real images from Berkeley segmentation data set (BSDS500) with the annotated ground truth. Experimental results show that our method can infer the 2.1D sketch with high accuracy.

With the rapid growth of video resources, techniques for efficient organization of video clips are becoming appealing in the multimedia domain. In this article, a sketch-based approach is proposed to intuitively organize video clips by: (1) enhancing their narrations using sketch annotations and (2) structurizing the organization process by gesture-based free-form sketching on touch devices. There are two main contributions of this work. The first is a sketch graph, a novel representation for the narrative structure of video clips to facilitate content organization. The second is a method to perform context-aware sketch recommendation scalable to large video collections, enabling common users to easily organize sketch annotations. A prototype system integrating the proposed approach was evaluated on the basis of five different aspects concerning its performance and usability. Two sketch searching experiments showed that the proposed context-aware sketch recommendation outperforms, in terms of accuracy and scalability, two state-of-the-art sketch searching methods. Moreover, a user study showed that the sketch graph is consistently preferred over traditional representations such as keywords and keyframes. The second user study showed that the proposed approach is applicable in those scenarios where the video annotator and organizer were the same person. The third user study showed that, for video content organization, using sketch graph users took on average 1/3 less time than using a mass-market tool Movie Maker and took on average 1/4 less time than using a state-of-the-art sketch alternative. These results demonstrated that the proposed sketch graph approach is a promising video organization tool.

Micro-expression is gaining more attention in both the scientific field and the mass media. It represents genuine emotions that people try to conceal, thus making it a promising cue for lie detection. Since micro-expressions are considered almost imperceptible to naked eyes, researchers have sought to automatically detect and recognize these fleeting facial expressions to help people make use of such deception cues. However, the lack of well-established micro-expression databases might be the biggest obstacle. Although several databases have been developed, there may exist some problems either in the approach of eliciting micro-expression or the labeling. We built a spontaneous micro-expression database with rigorous frame spotting, AU coding and micro-expression labeling. This paper introduces how the micro-expressions were elicited in a laboratory situation and how the database was built with the guide of psychology. In addition, this paper proposes issues that may help researchers effectively use micro-expression databases and improve micro-expression recognition. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Regulatory T cells (Treg) have significant roles in the immunopathology of patients with chronic hepatitis B (CHB) and exhibit an evident correlation with antiviral immunity when antiviral therapy is applied. In order to investigate how circulating Tregs are affected by telbivudine treatment and its significance in patients with CHB, peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) were isolated and the proportions of circulating cluster of differentiation (CD)4+CD25+CD127low and CD8+CD25+ T cells of CHB patients prior to and during the three or six months of treatment were assessed and detected by flow cytometric analysis. The levels of forkhead/winged helix transcription factor (Foxp3) mRNA were also quantified using quantitative polymerase chain reaction. A significantly higher percentage of CD4+CD25+CD127low and CD8+CD25+ T cells in the PBMCs of patients with CHB were identified compared with that of healthy individuals. Patients with CHB also demonstrated significantly higher levels of Foxp3 mRNA compared with that of healthy individuals. Following six months of telbivudine treatment, the proportion of circulating CD4+CD25+CD127low and CD8+CD25+ T cells and the relative levels of Foxp3 mRNA in patients with CHB was comparable to the proportion in healthy individuals. The proportions of circulating peripheral blood CD4+CD25+CD127low T cells were paralleled with its HBV DNA inhibition. The results of the present study indicate that telbivudine treatment reduces HBV DNA levels rapidly and indirectly affects the immune system by downregulating the proportion of circulating Treg markedly, which may be beneficial to restore the antiviral immune response.

China’s remarkable economic growth has produced dramatic structural and socioeconomic change. Economic growth has solved many problems but the accompanying changes in the economy and society have brought new problems to the fore. This has been recognized by China’s Government in the recent emphasis that it has placed on the need to create a “harmonious society.” The new leadership will wish to devise new policies for the current challenges and those ahead. In June 2013 a China Policy Forum was held in Oxford to discuss some of these challenges and their implications for future policy.1 Among the various topics that might have been chosen, four were selected and relevant experts were invited to make presentations in order to start the discussions. The topics chosen for this, the first Forum, were: policy against social instability; policy against rural poverty; technology policy; and policy for the aging population. After the very successful Policy Forum the four experts were invited to revise their presentations in light of the discussions, and to prepare them as papers for journal publication. Three have responded. We, the Guest Editors, are grateful to the Editors of China & World Economy for providing an excellent outlet for these (peer-reviewed) papers. The papers differ somewhat from most journal articles in economics in that the contributors were asked to divide their space roughly equally between an economic analysis of the main issues and the policy implications of that analysis. However, the contributors were not expected to come up with a cut-and-dried list of policies to be implemented. Rather, they were invited to present a reasoned set of policy options, based on their economic analysis, for government consideration. In this Introduction we highlight the main points of each paper, concentrating on the policy implications. Social instability is a surprisingly uncommon research topic for an economist, because concern about social instability can lurk behind much policy-making. China’s leadership views social instability as a threat both to the political order and to the continued rapid

Transforming China into an innovation-driven economy has been one of the top priorities of the Chinese Government. This paper examines the policy choices involved in the extended national innovation performance framework for creating an open innovation system. Innovation capabilities, incentives and institutional frameworks are examined. The paper argues that China should continue to increase its investment in RD adopt appropriate human resource management, such as appraisal and remuneration systems; create effective policies for research funding management; and evaluate the efficiency of research to encourage the creativity of researchers, managers and employees. The paper also discusses the space for industrial policy in the 21st century.

The mechanism of human cognition and its computability provide an important theoretical foundation to intelligent computation of visual media. This paper focuses on the intelligent processing of massive data of visual media and its corresponding processes of perception, memory, and judgment in cognition. In particular, both the human cognitive mechanism and cognitive computability of visual media are investigated in this paper at the following three levels: neurophysiology, cognitive psychology, and computational modeling. A computational cognition model of Perception, Memory, and Judgment (PMJ model for short) is proposed, which consists of three stages and three pathways by integrating the cognitive mechanism and computability aspects in a unified framework. Finally, this paper illustrates the applications of the proposed PMJ model in five visual media research areas. As demonstrated by these applications, the PMJ model sheds some light on the intelligent processing of visual media, and it would be innovative for researchers to apply human cognitive mechanism to computer science.

Since China's entry into the WTO, US anti-dumping (AD) actions against China have increased, particularly with respect to multiple petitions. Distinguishing between US single and multiple petitions, we examine the trade effects of US AD actions against China based on an unbalanced panel of quarterly trade data. The results show that a US single petition investigation greatly restrains US imports of the filed products from China but also causes more significant import diversion from non-named countries. In the short run, a preliminary AD duty imposed on China via a US multiple petition not only restrains US imports of the filed products from China but also prevents trade diversion from non-named countries. In the long run, a final AD duty on China resulting from a US multiple petition creates a larger destructive effect on China and causes US import diversion from non-named countries. Thus, a final AD duty imposed on China following a US multiple petition not only harms China's exports but also fails to help the US achieve import substitution. Furthermore, we have been able to reveal the negative trade effect of a preliminary AD duty even in cases where the ultimate decision is not to impose a final duty.

Actions can be represented as a hierarchy of goals and means, whereas the granularity of the top level depends on the action's complexity. So far, most evidence comes from imitation studies. We explored this issue by evaluating the detection of means and end changes in a recognition paradigm across ages and cultures. German and Chinese preschoolers (n = 53) and adults (n = 58) studied videos of tool-use actions differing in complexity and familiarity. In the test phase, participants judged identical, means-changed and end-changed actions as same or different. Changes of the actions' end were generally identified more accurately independent of age and culture. Means' changes, but not ends' changes, were detected more frequently for complex than for simple actions. Changes in familiar actions were recognised better than changes in unfamiliar actions. The data supports a hierarchical model of action representation where the end information is superordinate to means information.

Previous studies have shown that we need to distinguish between means and end information about actions. It is unclear how these two subtypes of action information relate to each other with theoretical accounts postulating the superiority of end over means information and others linking separate means and end routes of processing to actions of differential meaningfulness. Action meaningfulness or familiarity differs between cultures. In a cross-cultural setting, we investigated how action familiarity influences recognition memory for means and end information. Object directed actions of differential familiarity were presented to Chinese and German participants. Action familiarity modulated the representation of means and end information in both cultures in the same way, although the effects were based on different stimulus sets. Our results suggest that, in the representation of actions in memory, end information is superordinate to means information. This effect is independent of culture whereas action familiarity is not.

With the rapid progress of the network and mobile techniques, mobile devices such as mobile phones and portable devices, have become one of the most important parts in common life. Efficient techniques for watching, navigating and sharing videos on mobile devices collaboratively are appealing in mobile environment. In this paper, we propose a novel approach supporting efficiently collaborative operations on videos with sketch gestures. Furthermore, effective collaborative annotation and navigation operations are given to interact with videos on mobile devices for facilitating users’ communication based on mobile devices’ characteristics. Gesture operation and collaborative interaction architecture are given and improved during the interactive process. Finally, a user study is conducted showing that the effectivity and collaborative accessibility of video exploration is improved.

Based on cognitive functionalities in human vision processing, we propose a computational cognitive model for object recognition with detailed algorithmic descriptions. The contribution of this paper is of two folds. Firstly, we present a systematic review on psychological and neurophysiological studies, which provide collective evidence for a distributed representation of 3D objects in the human brain. Secondly, we present a computational model which simulates the distributed mechanism of object vision pathway. Experimental results show that the presented computational cognitive model outperforms five representative 3D object recognition algorithms in computer science research.

Image retargeting adjusts images to arbitrary sizes such that they can be viewed on different displays. Content-aware image retargeting has been receiving increased attention. In particular, researchers have improved a patch-wise scaling method for image retargeting at the object level. The scaling partitions the image into rectangular patches of adaptive sizes, which are comparable to the sizes of the salient objects in the image. This partitioning is based on a visual-saliency map; accordingly, the method labels the patches as important or unimportant. Then, the method scales the important patches as uniformly as possible and stretches or squeezes the unimportant patches to fit the target size. A patch-based image-similarity measure finds the optimal set of scaling factors. In experiments, the improved method performed well for three image types: lines and edges, foreground objects, and geometric structures.

This study employs a national survey of over 1100 British financial firms to ascertain the determinants of financial innovation and their sales success using the logit and the generalized Tobit models. We find that the likelihood of financial innovation rises with the size of financial firms, employee education, greater expenditure on research and development, the availability of finance and the extent to which firms cooperate with each other. Perceptions of economic risk and innovation costs are also influential. R&D, cooperation and human capital are the main variables driving the success of financial innovation, measured by the percentage share of innovations sold. Firms in London/the south have a significantly greater tendency to innovate, though Scotland also does well. Stock broking, fund management and related activities are more innovative than firms in the financial intermediation and pension/insurance sectors.

Video, as one typical digital media, is important for message communication. For efficient video content visualization and natural interaction such as video browsing and searching, we propose a sketch-based video summarization with fluent sketch interaction in this paper. Firstly, we present the sketch representation for video semantics, which takes the advantages of abstractness and generality of sketches. The concept of semantic sketch is proposed, which supports annotating video contents with sketches. Furthermore, an optimized layout algorithm for sketch summarization is presented. Secondly, we present the interaction techniques for sketch summarization and natural sketch gesture operations. From the viewpoint of cognitive psychology, we analyze the sketch representation, as well as the effects and relations of cognitive units in sketch interaction. Finally, user studies show that the proposed sketch summarization and sketch interaction improve user efficiency in terms of acquiring the main video content and reduce users’ cognitive load.

Micro-expression has gained a lot of attention because of its potential applications (e.g., transportation security) and theoretical implications (e.g., expression of emotions). However, the duration of micro-expression, which is considered as the most important characteristic, has not been firmly established. The present study provides evidence to define the duration of micro-expression by collecting and analyzing the fast facial expressions which are the leakage of genuine emotions. Participants were asked to neutralize their faces while watching emotional video episodes. Among the more than 1,000 elicited facial expressions, 109 leaked fast expressions (less than 500 ms) were selected and analyzed. The distribution curves of total duration and onset duration for the micro-expressions were presented. Based on the distribution and estimation, it seems suitable to define micro-expression by its total duration less than 500 ms or its onset duration less than 260 ms. These findings may facilitate further studies of micro-expressions in the future.

The protective immunity induced by the whole-killed parasite vaccine against malarial blood-stage infection is dependent on the CD4+ T cell response. However, the mechanism underlying this robust CD4+ T cell response elicited by the whole-killed parasite vaccine is still largely unknown. In this study, we observe that immunization with Plasmodium yoelii–parasitized RBC lysate activates complement C5 and generates C5a. However, the protective efficacy against P. yoelii 17XL challenge is considerably reduced, and the malaria-specific CD4+ T cell activation and memory T cell differentiation are largely suppressed in the C5aR-deficient (C5aR−/−) mice. An adoptive transfer assay demonstrates that the reduced protection of C5aR−/− mice is closely associated with the severely impaired CD4+ T cell response. This is further confirmed by the fact that administration of C5aR antagonist significantly reduces the protective efficacy of the immunized B cell–deficient mice. Further study indicates that the defective CD4+ T cell response in C5aR−/− mice is unlikely involved in the expansion of CD4+CD25+Foxp3+ T cells, but strongly linked to a defect in dendritic cell (DC) maturation and the ability to allostimulate CD4+ T cells. These results demonstrate that C5aR signaling is essential for the optimal induction of the malaria-specific CD4+ T cell response by the whole-killed parasite vaccine through modulation of DCs function, which provides us with new clues to design an effective blood-stage subunit vaccine and helps us to understand the mechanism by which the T cell response is regulated by the complement system.

Electrodeposition of copper was performed on the polyaniline/poly(ethylene terephthalate) conductive textiles in an aqueous electrolyte solution. The investigations of electrochemical deposition and dissolution processes of copper on and from textile electrodes were studied using cyclic voltammetry technique. Galvanostatic experiments give the evidence for reduction reactions of polyaniline layers and copper ions. The morphology observations by scanning electron microscopy show the nodular crystal and 3D branching microstructure of the coatings depend on the parameters current density and time of the copper electroreduction. Effects of current density and depositing time on the composition of the metallic-polymer layers on textile substrates were confirmed by energy dispersive X-ray and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. X-ray diffraction measurements for the copper films galvanostatically formed display the crystallographic structures with a preferred orientation.

By inhibiting target gene expression, microRNAs (miRNAs) play major roles in various physiological and pathological processes. miR-146a, a miRNA induced upon lipopolysaccharide (LPS) stimulation and virus infection, is also highly expressed in patients with immune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis, Sjögren's syndrome, and psoriasis. Whether the high level of miR-146a contributes to any of these pathogenesis-related processes remains unknown. To elucidate the function of miR-146a in vivo, we generated a transgenic (TG) mouse line overexpressing miR-146a. Starting at an early age, these TG mice developed spontaneous immune disorders that mimicked human autoimmune lymphoproliferative syndrome (ALPS) with distinct manifestations, including enlarged spleens and lymph nodes, inflammatory infiltration in the livers and lungs, increased levels of double-negative T cells in peripheral blood, and increased serum immunoglobulin G levels. Moreover, with the adoptive transfer approach, we found that the B-cell population was the major etiological factor and that the expression of Fas, a direct target of miR-146a, was significantly dampened in TG germinal center B cells. These results indicate that miR-146a may be involved in the pathogenesis of ALPS by targeting Fas and may therefore serve as a novel therapeutic target.

This study investigated whether low-level attentional processes as indicated by saccade trajectories are modulated by higher-order factors as indicated by participants' cultural background. We hypothesized that if the East Asian participants engage in context-dependent attentional processing to a greater extent than the Western participants, then the magnitude of the distractor effect on saccade trajectories (Doyle & Walker, 2001) should be larger with the East Asian participants than with the Western participants. Participants executed vertical saccades towards targets presented on the vertical meridian above or below fixation. Simultaneously with the target, a distractor appeared in one of the screen quadrants. Consistently with our hypothesis, we found evidence that the saccades of the Chinese participants tended to curve away from the distractors more strongly than the saccades of the German participants. However, this effect was restricted to the upper distractors and the lower targets. The findings are discussed in terms of cross-cultural differences in distractor-related activation and inhibition and functional specialization of hemifields. (c) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

For decades, a spirited debate has existed over whether infants’ remarkable capacity to learn words is shaped primarily by universal features of human language or by specific featuers of the particulare native language they are acquiring. A strong focus for this debate has been a well-documented difference in early word learning: Infants’ success in learning verbs lags behind their success in learning nouns.. In this review, we articulate both sides of the debate and summarize new cross-linguistic evidence from infants that underscores the role of universal features and begins to clarify the impact of distinctly different languages on early language and conceptual development.

This paper investigated how implicit and explicit knowledge is reflected in event-related potentials (ERPs) in sequence learning. ERPs were recorded during a serial reaction time task. The results showed that there were greater RT benefits for standard compared with deviant stimuli later than early on, indicating sequence learning. After training, more standard triplets were generated under inclusion than exclusion tests and more standard triplets under exclusion than chance level, indicating that participants acquired both explicit and implicit knowledge. However, deviant targets elicited enhanced N2 and P3 components for targets with explicit knowledge but a larger N2 effect for targets with implicit knowledge, revealing that implicit knowledge expresses itself in relatively early components (N2) and explicit knowledge in additional P3 components. The results help resolve current debate about the neural substrates supporting implicit and explicit learning.

In this paper, a novel recognition algorithm based on discriminant tensor subspace analysis (DTSA) and extreme learning machine (ELM) is introduced. DTSA treats a gray facial image as a second order tensor and adopts two-sided transformations to reduce dimensionality. One of the many advantages of DTSA is its ability to preserve the spatial structure information of the images. In order to deal with micro-expression video clips, we extend DTSA to a high-order tensor. Discriminative features are generated using DTSA to further enhance the classification performance of ELM classifier. Another notable contribution of the proposed method includes significant improvements in face and micro-expression recognition accuracy. The experimental results on the ORL, Yale, YaleB facial databases and CASME micro-expression database show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

This article explores the paths of regional technology development in a large open developing economy. Findings from the research based on Chinese data suggest a differentiated approach to regional technology development. In technologically advanced regions, indigenous R&D; plays a more important role than learning-by-doing while in backward regions the latter becomes more important. Interregional technology transfer is found to have a more significant impact on regional technology development than Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and its effect intensifies when the technology level of the recipient region is close to the technological frontier. R&D; plays a key role in both the assimilation of foreign technologies in advanced regions and the assimilation of interregional technology transfer; learning-by-doing only affects the latter.

We investigate the impact of management capabilities of foreign firms on the management capabilities and performance of domestic firms using survey data on the UK retail sector. On average, foreign-owned retail firms achieve higher management capability scores and are more productive than domestic firms. Our results suggest two faces of foreign management capabilities. On the one hand, capabilities that can be codified, for example human resource management capabilities, generate some positive spillovers on the relevant management capabilities of local firms. On the other hand, dimensions of capabilities that are more tacit and highly competitive exert a negative competitive effect on domestic firms' own management capabilities. While the overall management capabilities of domestic firms are found to have a significantly positive effect on their own productive efficiency, we find no evidence of a direct efficiency effect of foreign management capabilities on local firms. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.

This paper explores the role of indigenous and foreign innovation efforts in technological upgrading in developing countries, taking into account sectoral specificities in technical change. Using a Chinese firm-level panel dataset covering 2001–05, the paper decomposes productivity growth into technical change and efficiency improvement and examines the impact of indigenous and foreign innovation efforts on these changes. Indigenous firms are found to be the leading force on the technological frontier in the low- and medium-technology industries, while foreign-invested firms enjoy a clear lead in the high-technology sector. Collective indigenous R&D activities at the industry level are found to be the major driver of technology upgrading of indigenous firms that push out the technology frontier. While foreign investment appears to contribute to static industry capabilities, R&D activities of foreign-invested firms have exerted a significant negative effect on the technical change of local firms over the sample period.

This paper explores the influence of spatial effects on the convergence of total factor productivity (TFP) across Chinese regions. We use the Moran index, Markov transition matrix and panel data techniques to analyse spatial dependence, transition dynamics and disparities in TFP across Chinese provinces over the period from 1978 to 2004. We find that in the period following 1978, there has been an increase in spatial dependence in provincial-level TFPs across the various regions in China. However, the extent of this dependence is not the same across regions and the direction of movement of provincial TFP does not show convergence. On the contrary, provincial TFPs at the middle quintile level moved to the quintile levels at the highest and lowest levels, suggesting divergence and polarization in TFP across Chinese regions. The ‘New Eastern Region’ appears to be a TFP convergence club over the sampling period but no evidence is found suggesting convergence of TFP between provinces in the other subgroups. Policy implications are discussed.

Elderly people do not categorize emotional facial expressions as accurately as younger people, particularly negative emotions. Although age-related impairments in decoding emotions in facial expressions are well documented, the causes of this deficit are poorly understood. This study examined the potential mechanisms that account for this age-related categorization deficit by assessing its dependence on presentation time.Thirty young (19-27 years old) and 31 older (68-78 years old) Chinese adults were asked to categorize the six basic emotions in facial expressions, each presented for 120, 200, 600, or 1000 ms, before and after exposure to a neutral facial expression.Shortened presentation times caused an age-related deficit in the recognition of happy faces, whereas no deficit was observed at longer exposure times. An age-related deficit was observed for all negative emotions but was not exacerbated by shorter presentation times.Age-related deficits in categorization of positive and negative emotions are caused by different mechanisms. Because negative emotions are perceptually similar, they cause high categorization demands. Elderly people may need more evidence in favor of the target emotion than younger people, and they make mistakes if this surplus of evidence is missing. In contrast, perceptually distinct happy faces were easily identified, and elderly people only failed when the presentation time was too short for their slower perceptual processing.

It remains unclear whether probabilistic category learning in the feedback-based (FB) weather prediction task can be mediated by a non-declarative or procedural learning system. To address this issue, we compared the effects of training time and verbal working memory, which influence the declarative learning system but not the non-declarative learning system, in the FB and paired-associate (PA) weather prediction tasks, as the PA task recruits a declarative learning system. The results of Experiment 1 showed that the optimal accuracy in the PA condition was significantly decreased when the training time was reduced from 7 s to 3 s, but this did not occur in the FB condition, although shortened training time impaired the acquisition of explicit knowledge in both conditions. The results of Experiment 2 showed that the concurrent working memory task impaired the optimal accuracy and the acquisition of explicit knowledge in the PA condition but did not influence the optimal accuracy or the acquisition of self-insight knowledge in the FB condition. The apparent dissociation results between the FB and PA conditions suggested that a non-declarative or procedural learning system is involved in the FB weather prediction task and provided new evidence for the multiple-systems theory of human category learning.

China has now moved considerably away from being an imitative latecomer to technology toward to being an innovation-driven economy. The key lessons from China’s experience are that (1) there is synergy between External Knowledge and Indigenous Innovation because the process of learning the tacit knowledge required in using the foreign technology fully is made easier by strong in-house R&D; capability; (2) the open innovation approach is very important because it allows multiple driving forces—the state, the private sector and MNEs—with each playing a changing role over time; and (3) the commencement of foreign technology transfer and investment in indigenous innovation should go hand in hand. Without the numerous well-funded programs to build up the innovation infrastructure to increase the absorptive capacity of Chinese firms, foreign technology would have remained static technology embedded in imported machines and would not have strengthened indigenous technological capability. However, China could still end up in the middle-income trap, unless it undertakes a series of critical reforms in its innovation regime in order to keep moving up growth trajectories that are increasingly skill-intensive and technology-intensive.

This study examines the impact of mobile phone enhanced intervention in agricultural extension service delivery in India. Findings show that the amount, quality and speed of service delivery have improved significantly because of the intervention. There are also benefits in terms of greater knowledge and awareness of new agricultural practices, farmers’ aspiration to try new technology in the future and access to credit. The system does not discriminate against farmers from disadvantaged and low education backgrounds. Thus, a system of well-used technology, which is assisted by trained village youths, can serve as a tool for inclusive development.

Researchers have proposed that the culture in which we are raised shapes the way that we attend to the objects and events that surround us. What remains unclear, however, is how early any such culturally-inflected differences emerge in development. Here, we address this issue directly, asking how 24-month-old infants from the US and China deploy their attention to objects and actions in dynamic scenes. By analyzing infants' eye movements while they observed dynamic scenes, the current experiment revealed striking convergences, overall, in infants' patterns of visual attention in the two communities, but also pinpointed a brief period during which their attention reliably diverged. This divergence, though modest, suggested that infants from the US devoted relatively more attention to the objects and those from China devoted relatively more attention to the actions in which they were engaged. This provides the earliest evidence for strong overlap in infants' attention to objects and events in dynamic scenes, but also raises the possibility that by 24 months, infants' attention may also be shaped subtly by the culturally-inflected attentional proclivities characteristic of adults in their cultural communities.

A fundamental question in vision research is whether visual recognition is determined by edge-based information (e.g., edge, line, and conjunction) or surface-based information (e.g., color, brightness, and texture). To investigate this question, we manipulated the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the scene and the mask in a backward masking task of natural scene categorization. The behavioral results showed that correct classification was higher for line-drawings than for color photographs when the SOA was 13ms, but lower when the SOA was longer. The ERP results revealed that most latencies of early components were shorter for the line-drawings than for the color photographs, and the latencies gradually increased with the SOA for the color photographs but not for the line-drawings. The results provide new evidence that edge-based information is the primary determinant of natural scene categorization, receiving priority processing; by contrast, surface information takes longer to facilitate natural scene categorization.

Micro-expressions are facial expressions that are characterized by short durations, involuntary generation and low intensity, and they are regarded as unique cues revealing one’s hidden emotions. Although methods for the recognition of general facial expressions have been intensively investigated, little progress has been made in the automatic recognition of micro-expressions. To further facilitate development in this field, we present a new facial expression database, CAS(ME)2, which includes 250 spontaneous macro-expression samples and 53 micro-expression samples. The CAS(ME)2 database offers both macro-expression and micro-expression samples collected from the same participants. The emotion labels in the current database are based on a combination of Action Units (AUs), self-reports of every facial movement and the emotion types of the emotion-evoking videos to improve the validity of the labeling. Baseline evaluation was also provided. This database may provide more valid and ecological expression samples for the development of automatic facial recognition systems.

How do unique objects affect multiple-object tracking? Recent research has catalogued seemingly contradictory findings, varying from enhanced to impaired tracking performance. In this study, we explore the role of object complexity in this broad range of phenomena. In a series of three experiments, we demonstrate that unique objects of varying complexity can produce both costs and benefits on tracking performance. These experiments show that the key effects of uniqueness in object tracking are results of a tradeoff between tracking operation and processing of object identity information within the capacity limit of working memory.

This paper analyzes the unit prices of imports into the EU, Japan, and the US during 1989–2006 of manufactured products in which China specializes. It finds that imports from middle income countries are in close price competition with those from China and that there has been price competition between China and high-income countries in low-technology products. By contrast, the impact of China’s exports on low-income countries is not through price competition but through market expansion. China’s WTO entry had a once-for-all shock on the export prices of the high-income countries. The price competition effect of China’s exports weakened over the time period of 1989–2006, suggesting a gradual change in competition from price to nonprice factors such as quality and variety. If sustained, this trajectory poses an increasing competitive threat to high-income economies in the future.

Electrically conductive films based on polyaniline (PANI) and polyethylene glycol (PEG) molecules of different chain length were synthesized on polyester textiles (PET) through in situ polymerization. Fabric supports were placed in the monomer bath in the presence of polymeric additive firstly and then immersed into the oxidant solution to initiate the reaction. Influence of the PEG segment length on monomer adsorption process toward fabrics was investigated by comparing the adsorption thermodynamic parameters. The polymeric layers’ morphologies have been evaluated using the field emission scanning electron microscope, and the film formation mechanism has been investigated. Compositions of the films synthesized in the absence and presence of PEG were characterized by attenuated total reflection Fourier transform infrared. The electrical resistance measurement results indicated that the electrical conductivity of PET/PANI–PEG composite fabrics decreases slowly as the PEG segments length increased, and the ...

This article explores the impact of computerisation on the efficiency of rural cooperative banks using recent survey data on the usage of various types of information technology in rural cooperative banks in India. Findings from the research suggest that the adoption of appropriate technology such as stand-alone computers in branches promotes the efficiency of rural credit cooperatives; on the other hand, the employment of advanced local area networks is negatively associated with their efficiency. The skills in relation to information technologies of bank staff and the absorptive capacity of service users and the wider community are of crucial importance in the enhancement of efficiency. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Rotavirus (RV) infection causes serious dehydrating diarrhoea in infants and newborn animals. Our previous study revealed that cyclophilin A (CYPA), a peptidyl-prolyl cis–trans isomerase (PPIase), could be temporarily upregulated in RV-infected MA104 cells in early stage of infection (unpublished data). To find out the possible roles of CYPA in RV infection, we overexpressed and silenced CYPA in various cell lines by gene transfection and shRNA. We found that transfection of CYPA significantly inhibited RV replication, while silencing the expression of CYPA significantly increased RV replication. Accordingly, overexpression of CYPA significantly increased IFN-β production; while silencing CYPA significantly reduced IFN-β production. This effect of CYPA on IFN-β production was independent of its PPIase activity. Moreover, IFN-β secreted by host cells in RV infection had a critical repressive effect on viral replication. Finally, we found that inhibiting JNK pathway by SP600125 and JNK siRNA abrogated the effect of CYPA on IFN-β transcription in RV-infected MA104 cells. Together, our data suggested that CYPA inhibited RV replication by facilitating host IFN-β production, which was independent on the PPIase activity of CYPA but dependent on the activation of JNK signaling pathway.